Selling a startup means choosing more than a price. It also means choosing the people you will work with next. In this conversation with Dalton Caldwell, Paul Buchheit recounts how FriendFeed nearly sold to Twitter before he decided Facebook was the team he wanted to join.
FriendFeed built a social network that attracted attention for its product ideas, but Paul says it never reached the scale it needed. The team was considering a pivot while potential buyers kept approaching them. They decided to hear the offers.
Facebook’s first offer did not get far. Paul recalls the team thanking its representatives for their time rather than making a counteroffer. One visitor asked whether he could finish his tea. They waited, said goodbye, and stopped talking to Facebook for a while. Paul’s point about negotiation is simple: you have to be willing to walk away.
What brought him back was his assessment of the people. In Paul’s telling, Facebook understood why its product grew and had a team dedicated to making that growth repeatable. He came to believe it would win the market. If FriendFeed was not going to become the company he had hoped to build, he wanted to join people who were succeeding.
Paul reopened the conversation with Mark Zuckerberg by laying out his objections: the offer was unattractive, Facebook had a reputation problem, and he did not want a job. He recalls spending hours walking and talking through changes to the deal. An agreement followed, then a scramble to find available lawyers and complete the paperwork over the weekend. Facebook announced the acquisition in 2009.
Paul believes the attraction for Facebook was FriendFeed’s team, not its audience. He describes co-founder Bret Taylor as someone who could rethink a product and implement the improvements with unusual speed. FriendFeed had struggled to grow a social network, but its ability to build products and attract engineers was valuable to a company that already knew how to grow.
Joining Facebook also clarified what Paul wanted to do. He enjoyed learning how the company worked, but found himself more interested in the earliest stages of building something new. The acquisition solved one question—where the team should go next—without settling what work he would find most rewarding.